blues clues

Kanye was certainly not the first to say, when he told Sway, “you ain’t got the answers…!” This is a rather common reply to people who opine about, and argue against, status quos in their variegated guises and how they must be destroyed in order to produce something like justice in the world. It is often claimed, for example, that if one is not offering a concrete set of solutions in a one-to-one relationship to the problems enumerated that they have an inherent flaw, the inherent flaw producing a fundamental incapacity for one to resist. That is, one isn’t allowed to disagree if they’ve not a list of otherwise plans. Though I disagree with the thrust of such ludicrous opinion, I still want to return to Blues for Mister Charles to offer a set of thought experiments, what my friend Lindsey Andrews says produces “questioning [that] leads…away from ‘explanation’ and allows [one] to describe anew time, history, and experience in ways that can respond to the insistent and unpredictable materiality of the world.” This, she further offers, can go “beyond epistemological determinism, closed ontologies, the limits of historical causality, ideology, and institutional structures.” So, in brief, I want to offer a few thought experiments that could help disrupt the notion of education, through the institution of schooling as it currently exists, in the service of privileging learning as a social, critical, open-ended practice.

So, some made up thought experiments:

ONE
Organizations like Teach for America, as a friend once suggested, could focus on building capacity in cities rather than bring a supposed cadre of caring individuals from outside those cities – people from mostly elite, private universities – to teach. Instead of utilizing funds raised to train post-college students for five weeks in order to dedicate two years of teaching in underserved public schools, monies could be funneled to teachers, teacher assistants and aids who currently work in public schools. This would give them the resources to build capacity in location. It would disrupt the sort of logic of disaster capitalism and poverty volunteerism, wherein students from elite universities give time and energy to feel-good projects. This would, of course, mean a radical reorganization of funding for organizations like TFA, and would put pressure on thinking about local communities not as transient, but as places where people live, where people have thriving lives. This would simply give resources such that such thriving could be more achievable.TWO
End standardized testing as it currently is apocalyptic literature. Standardized tests are high stakes for both teachers and students currently construed, and the ability for schools to receive funding under Race to the Top is connected to their performance on such tests. Such that they are apocalyptic in nature, meaning they serve a purportedly prophetic, end-times, doomsday function. They supposedly foretell the cognitive abilities of students and the pedagogical insufficiencies of instructors. They are used in the service of heightening the powers of the nation-state to determine the destiny of its subjects. In this literature, though, is not a renewal of the world but the perpetual brushing up against doom, against destruction, without ever a promise or movement towards justice. Simply, this literature is used to condemn certain classes of people to unending failure, economic and social lack.

THREE
I have been obsessed with versioning lately and Blackpentecostal singing has always intrigued me because people in different locations will sing the very same song with different words in different random places. Some fiction:

when i was a kid, this showed up mostly when we had visitors to our church or when we went to visit other churches for afternoon services at churches with whom we fellowshipped. my brother and i would notice how people would sing the same songs we knew but with subtle differences. of course, you’d have to be part of the pentecostal world to really appreciate it. but we loved to sing, for example, one song as

i believe god, i believe god / i believe god will do what he said
no matter what problems may bring / i believe, i believe god

but then we’d be somewhere else, some other church but they’d say

i believe god, i believe god / i believe god can do anything
no matter what problems may bring / i believe, i believe god

of course. the slight difference between “will do what he said” and “can do anything” is illusory to most. the rhythm was ostensibly the same. the repetition and the sentiment, pretty much consistent. but my brother and i’d hear this and we’d look at each other and smirk just a bit. not only smirk, i suppose, but we would want our correcting voices to be heard, so over the incorrectness, we’d say as loudly as possible – even if only to each other – will do what he said! – forcefully. it was a moment to articulate difference as inherently part of the pentecostal world in which we were part. it was cool because we’d notice the difference without being able to account for it or name what it meant. all we knew to do was keep singing what we knew the words to be a bit louder. it became an occasion for us to laugh with each other at them. it wasn’t disparaging or anything like that. they would take our well-worn testimony service songs (this, well before the advent of powerpoint and screens, at least in our churches) and enunciate them with different lyrics. they “messed up” our song. but the songs never belonged to us in the first place.

The critique in Blues for Mister Charles was about how education, through schooling, attempts to make us the best kinds of citizen-subjects, that it requires us to be indebted to the nation-state in order for its ongoing operation. So perhaps Blackpentecostal song can be an articulation of the resistance to normative function and form. This to say that Zora Neale Hurston’s concept of variation with difference has a lot to do with learning over and against schooling, over and against education. What she calls “characteristics” of black performance – with variation around a theme being a primary marker – is instructive for considering the utility of the local as a means to resist the governance, the governmentality, the surveilling that obtains to national standards, national rubrics.

Local disruptions are already proving to be critical interventions against national standards, against the notion of the standard. What Blackpentecostal singing does is not simply assert that the original is not the only way but that the very concept of pure origin must be interrogated, that what we have is only an irreducible series of relations. What works in Philadelphia is in relation to, but different from, what works in Chicago. And what works in Chicago is in relation to, but different from, what will work in Portland, Oregon, what will work in Los Angeles. But the desire to produce disruption to the logics of national standards, privatizing of education, charters and choices are variations on a theme. What is urgent in our times is that the theme under which we typically think about learning must be uprooted from the making of proper citizen subjects indebted to the nation-state.

To be clear, the idea of the local runs counter to the concepts of choice and charters because they are based in corporatized models, not simply nationalist but nationalist-towards-global competitiveness. And this because public resources are used in the name of local solutions but are exploited for private, anti-public and thus anti-social ends. More, these schools still proliferate the idea about education, through schooling, as making of its students proper, obedient citizens. These schools do not disrupt the logics of neoliberalisms, they are not freedom academies. Rather, they perniciously promote neoliberalism realities against imaginative leaps while lining pockets of elites.

FOUR
But what about going to college? Currently, the centering display of inequitable power within educational institutions is their desired capacity to make people accountable to themselves. Such that a student homeschooled, another unschooled and yet another traditionally schooled each must make their labor coherent and legible to whatever institution they desire to enter. The institution, however, is not required to make itself available to the desires and labor of such students, it is not about what the students bring but how said students can replicate the normative form of the institutions and the normative arc for becoming a citizen. One can spend their days in radical primary and secondary schools, backpack through Europe and volunteer for causes, but will still eventually need to “mature” and become cohesive, legible students that desire educations for a good jobs, in order to still replicate the indebtedness to the current configuration of political economic inequity. This notion of being mature has everything to do with the dissociation from, the escape from, the local as a normative trajectory of becoming.

The notion of “going away to school” is not transcendent across linear space and time, though it does function in our society to index the process of maturation. One’s ability to “go away” revolves around normative class aspirations and theories of citizenship, such that we consider those who live at home while in post-secondary education as in a wholly different and developmentally deficient progression categorically (thanks to Allison Curseen for prompting in me this idea regarding the difference between growth and development). In different Canadian provinces, for example, people tend to choose local universities, something like our community colleges, without there being a denigration of the concept. And even within the borders of these United States, many students attend state schools that are close to home, though the overarching narrative is that one should go away for college education. [Full disclosure: the university at which I teach has roughly 50% of its students from the immediate Southern California area and many live at home with parents.]

I focus on the concept of going away to simply mark the ways a normative developmental narrative regarding one’s education often is about leaving the social space from which one emerges, about denigrating the sociality that makes us possible, in order to become the scholar, the theorist, the thinker, over and against the social that is the purported zone of homogeneity. But because of the digital, we actually have an opportunity to rethink what the bounds of the local are, sorta like when Jesus implies that one’s neighbor is whomever one finds oneself around in need at any given moment. The digital allows us to consider the emergence of localness as grounded in communities of theme, communities that are not just near each other physically, but communities that form of necessity in order to respond to moments of crisis. When Susan G. Komen decided to defund Planned Parenthood in 2012, a localized community emerged quickly to respond through email, message boards, tweets and facebook posts. This localness was based on the object of analysis having within itself a centripetal force such that folks gathered around it, mobilized around it, in order to enact change. So I’m not making an argument that folks must attend schools “close to home” physically as the corrective to the logics of education in the service of becoming citizen-subjects. Rather, I am arguing that the theme of learning being pressed into such service must be disrupted, and it can be disrupted through another spin, the spin of the object, the object drawing us to itself, the object of justice.

END
These are, admittedly, wild thought experiments. But that, I think, is my point. I’d like to imagine another way of being, another mode of thinking and learning that does not submit to the dominant narratives nor the current configurations of inequity. Perhaps wild thinking, radical imagination, can give a momentary disruption long enough to think that an otherwise is possible because it is, in all its unruliness, thinkable.